All Rise...

The Charge

He thought he knew everything about celebrity. Until he met one.

Opening Statement

The best documentaries are not necessarily the stories that filmmakers set
out to tell. In Teenage Paparazzo, first-time filmmaker Adrian Grenier
begins his project as a simple human interest about pre-teen paparazzi on the
street of Los Angeles, but soon finds the project evolving into a complex
exploration of the relationship between celebrity and society.

Facts of the Case

One night in Los Angeles, Entourage star Adrian Grenier has his
photograph taken by a paparazzo. This happens an awful lot to Adrian. He's a
famous person these days. His show is a huge hit on HBO. To his surprise, the
paparazzo in question is a fourteen year-old boy named Austin Visschedyk.
Astonished, Grenier strikes up a relationship with the kid.

What would make a young kid grab a camera and lurk in garbage cans in front
of celebrity hangouts at 3AM—and on a school night, no less? Grenier
decides to turn the cameras on Austin and find out. He starts following Austin
around, filming his comings and goings, his numerous run-ins with celebrities,
his paparazzo buddies, in an effort not only to understand this fascinating
teenager, but to also gain insight into the celebrity paparazzo culture
itself.

The Evidence

Art imitates life, or so they say. If so, Adrian Grenier just might be living
in a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. The handsome star of HBO's hit series Entourage, his character Vincent is a
famous celebrity overwhelmed by paparazzi and fan adoration. In real life,
Adrian is overwhelmed by paparazzi and fan adoration. The difference between his
professional life and his personal life is blurred beyond recognition. He finds
the paparazzi in particular to be annoying. They hound and interfere, swarm
around him and his celebrity friends at all hours, eradicating any chance of
maintaining a private life outside of the spotlight. And then, enter Austin
Visschedyk; a precocious and strong-willed child with a ten thousand dollar
camera in hand, snapping pictures with the rapid-fire fury of a machine gun.
Suddenly, Adrian wants to understand paparazzi. What makes a fourteen year-old
kid sign up for this?

Through Austin, Adrian gets to know the paparazzo subculture: how they
behave, why they do what they do, their ethics or lack thereof. He even gets to
be one, in disguise, viewing the celebrity world from the other side of the
camera lens. In the mother of all ironies, it turns out that paparazzi value
their privacy and do not appreciate having their picture taken. By bringing a
camera crew into the midst of a culture, one who understands their relationship
with cameras through one direction only, Grenier upsets the balance between the
observers and the observed.

Then something unexpected happens. Austin, the young pre-teen paparazzo
himself becomes an object of attention, simply through association to the film
in progress. People start to recognize him—he's the kid the
Entourage guy is making a movie about. He signs autographs and has his
picture taken. Celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, once the objects
of his attention as a paparazzo, start sending him text messages; an
acknowledgement of him as an equal, for he is one of them now. In the ultimate
turn of events, he even starts blowing off Grenier and his documentary with all
the calloused disregard of an egotistical star.

Grenier observes his experiment gone awry with a growing sense of alarm and
trepidation. Through the simple act of filming this boy, he has disrupted the
natural order of things, upset the delicate balance, created Frankenstein's
monster. Celebrities are celebrities, and paparazzi are the elected surrogates
that represent our collective need to connect with the rich and famous. The
Walls of Jericho separate these two worlds. Now, against all odds, Adrian has
become a paparazzo of sorts, stalking a surly celebrity who is trying to avoid
his camera. And the paparazzo is the star. Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living
together! Mass hysteria!

Teenage Paparazzo is a tremendous documentary, one of the strongest I
have seen this year. It is so sincere, so honest and so forthright about its
subject matter; full of questions, not declarations. Grenier avoids the classic
pitfall of the inexperienced documentary filmmaker and allows the film to take
its natural course, wherever it may lead, rather than trying to push an agenda.
There is no rejection or approval of paparazzi culture, no judgments passed. The
end result is fluid and dynamic in tone, a frank and open dialog between
celebrity and society—a relationship complex and riddled with
psychological and sociological pitfalls.

Do paparazzi fill a sociological need by breaching the divide between the
two worlds, bringing us closer to our idols? Celebrities hate them, but a
celebrity by definition is someone who puts themselves deliberately in the
public eye. People buy tabloid magazines to see celebrities doing normal
things—shopping, walking their dog, picking their nose—and revel
knowing their idols are people too. Meeting a celebrity during a chance
encounter on the street turns the most stalwart and unassuming of person into a
quivering, mouth-breathing fan, turned giddy at the prospect of shaking hands
with a famous person. So which came first, the chicken or the paparazzo? Who
made who?

Presented in anamorphic widescreen, Teenage Paparazzo looks solid on
DVD, but not great. Shot mostly on handheld cameras on the streets of Los
Angeles, the film has a gritty texture that reflects the small, mobile digital
cameras used to assemble the film. Colors are solid, white levels are average.
Black levels tend to get eaten up by the digital grain. Audio comes in Dolby
Digital 5.1, which is overkill; the film is primarily dialog-driven, narrated by
Adrian Grenier. Bass response is average and dialog is clear.

In terms of extras, we get a smattering of deleted scenes with a handy "play
all" button; nothing worth writing home about.

Closing Statement

Teenage Paparazzo is a film about the transformative power of the
camera. The very act of observing is inherently exploitative; whatever is placed
in front of a lens is irrevocably changed, and not always for the better.
Grenier begins the project as a human interest piece about a teenage shutterbug,
but the end result is a fascinating metaphorical and intertextual dissection of
our voyeuristic culture.

Or, if you skipped down here to the end, just to get the verdict? This is
one of the finest documentaries of 2010. Go get it.